TECH YARD

How To Set Flickr Photos As Twitter Backgrounds

Avinash — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:06:47 +0000

Feeling bored with default Twitter backgrounds, or static Twitter background Images.Then change your Twitter with your Flickr Images using Flickr My Background which sets your latest Flickr photo as your Twitter background image, updated every hour.

It’s very simple to setup, just provide your Flickr username and password and allow Flickr My Background App thats it.You can also stop Flickr My Background from rotating your Twitter Background with your Flickr Photos by visiting this URL and provide your Twitter username and password.

If your a professional photographer or a casual camera enthusiast then this can be useful in promoting your work.

Source : DownloadSquad

How To Insert YouTube Videos and Bing Images Search Results In PowerPoint Presentation

Avinash — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:56:45 +0000

MS Office Power Point is used for presentations in meetings, but till date you could only insert clipart,images, flash using 3rd party addons and videos that were present on your drive, but using authorStream Desktop MS Office addon you can now insert YouTube videos in your presentation, and share it online at AuthorStream keeping intact the videos in your presentation, and view or download the presentation at authorStream.

You can also search for images for your presentation from Bing, right from PowerPoint.On Installing the Office-addon you’’ see a new addition “AuthorStream” to the toolbar and from where you can search for videos and images.

Features :

Search for images (from Bing) and videos (from YouTube)
use a URL of an Image or YouTube video and insert them directly in your slide.
Upload your presentation directly to authorSTREAM from MS Office Powerpoint
Works only on MS Office PowerPoint 2007

How to Use :

Download and Install the Office 2007 Addon, next from the toolbar select “authorStream”, and the authorStream Ribbon can be seen, search for images or video that your looking for and click on the appropriate button and a new windows with the search results appear to the right of the Slide, Right Click on the image/video of your choice and select insert.

Note : You need an active internet connection during your presentation for the YouTube video to play.

Download : AuthorStream Office Addon (1.56 MB)

Source : DigitalInspiration

How To Transfer RAID Arrays Across Different Systems Without Loosing Compatibility

Avinash — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:47:14 +0000

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), RAID arrays are used to speed up disks access time, and to get better storage reliability and modern day motherboard’s make setting up an RAID Array easy,but the problem comes when you have to more your RAID Array over to another system because you lose RAID compatibility once you switch your motherboard vendor.

Raid2Raid by DiskInternals is a free universal RAID adaptor that lets you change your RAID Array over to a new motherboard of a different vendor, without loosing the RAID Array.Raid 2 Raid will re-assemble the array and mount it as a single drive letter. Even if your new motherboard lacks hardware RAID capabilities.

Raid 2 Raid Supports Intel, nVidia, and VIA chipsets and all types of RAID arrays, including JBod (RAID 0), Stripe (RAID 0), Mirror (RAID 1), RAID 5 (complete data recovery is possible if any disk is missing from the setup), and RAID 0+1 (RAID 10).

It supports file formats from Windows 2000 (Dynamic Disks) to Windows 2008, including FAT, NTFS, and EXT2 file system support, as well as Classic and GPT Partition Style support and is even makes it backward and forward compatible.

Features :

Makes RAID Transfer easier
Supports Intel, nVidia, and VIA chipsets
Supports JBod (RAID 0), Stripe (RAID 0), Mirror (RAID 1), RAID 5, and RAID 0+1 (RAID 10) Array types.
Supports files system both forward and backward compatible from Windows 2000 to Windows 2008.

You can also recover deleted data from your HDD using Raid 2 Raid, by opening the tool and selecting the drive from where you want to recover data, and select the files that you want to recover and select the backup destination location for storing the recovered data.

Download Raid 2 Raid

Gmail Introduces Super-Trustworthy,Anti-Phishing Key For Paypal and eBay

Avinash — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:11:50 +0000

Google GMail has recently out of beta, and now has a really nice feature to stop phishing activities that are commonly done fake eBay and Paypal email.

After activating “Authentication icon for verified senders” feature under Gmail Labs in your GMail Account, the next time you receive a mail from either PayPal or eBay a key icon is displayed next to authenticated messages from certain senders that spammers attempt to fake.Google does this by checking the “From” header of the sender’s email and is authenticated with DKIM,Anything else other than the verified sender won’t even appear in your spam folder because Gmail won’t accept it.

This currently works for mail from PayPal and eBay only and Google hopes to add more senders in the future.

Here’s how you can activate the Feature :

To Activate “Authentication icon for verified senders”,

Next from the list of experimental features select “Authentication Icon for Verified Senders”

Select “Enable” and and save the changes.

If all banks and financial institutions can join and come up with something like this,phishing attacks can be reduced by great number.

Source : GmailBlog

Mikogo – Free Desktop Sharing and Remote Access Tool

Avinash — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:47:29 +0000

Mikogo is a free desktop screen-sharing and remote access tool that lets have online web conferencing, troubleshoot problems with remote access to other machines, Product Demos, Online Presentations, and Webinars.Just register for a free account at Mikogo and Download a software and ready to share your desktop with anyone without an account can see your desktop, with just an invite code.

Features :

Desktop Sharing
Multiple Meeting Participants - Up to 10 participants can join your meeting and view your screen
Record Meeting and plackback -
Whiteboard - toolbar to illustrate and highlight areas on your screen
Transfer Files - Transfer files of up to 200MB during your conference.
Voice Conferencing Service -
All information transmitted during online meeting is encrypted via 256-Bit AES end-to-end encryption.
Unique Meeting ID and Meeting Password.

You can start and join meeting easily using Firefox Mikogo Addon and Mikogo Skype Extra.

How to use Mikogo.

After installing Desktop Client Mikogo,a tray icon “M” is visible,next Right Click on it and click “Start Meeting” which will generate a Meeting ID and for other to join the meeting share this Meeting ID with other.
Next users can visit “Mikogo HomePage” and click “Join Meeting” on the top right corner and download the “Mikogo Meeting Player” Run the software and enter the “Meeting ID” your friend shared and your “Name”.
To end a meeting right click on the tray icon.

How Does Mikogo Work ?

The meeting organizer and participants are currently in contact via phone.
The organizer starts a meeting from their desktop, receives a unique 9-digit meeting ID from the Mikogo server, and distributes the meeting ID to their participants.
Participants open their Internet browser, go to www.mikogo.com, click on “Join Meeting”. There are no installations or registrations required for the participants. They simply run the software and enter the meeting ID.
A connection is instantly established, and the participants can view the organizer’s screen in real time via the Mikogo viewer window.

The tool is free for both personal and commercial use and works on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 and Mac.

Download Mikogo (Windows) and Mikogo(MAC)

Download Mikogo Meeting Player

Source : WhoisMadhur

Images Source.

How To Delete index.dat Files In Windows OS

Avinash — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:26:15 +0000

Windows OS uses index.dat to store user activity.It contain all tracks of your online activity, where have you been on internet, what sites you visited, list of URL-s, files and documents you recently accessed and the most important part being they are not automatically deleted by Windows, and are also hidden, making it even difficult for novice users to delete and get rid of such data.

Index.dat Analyzer is a free tool that lets you browse,examine and delete index.dat files on your stored at different paths on your computer.It finds index.dat in 3 categories History, Cookies or Cache,You can also selectively delete index.dat files by checking the dat files that you want to delete, or select all to delete.

Image Source

Supported OS: Win XP, Windows Vista

Download Index.dat Analyzer.

Check how your blog looks on different monitor resolutions

Avinash — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:06:58 +0000

I’ve shared tools like MultipleIE, which allow you to see how how your webpages are being rendered in different versions of IE,to maintain cross browser compatibility.There’s also another aspect of designing webpages ie., how your webpages look on different display resolutions.

Check how your webpage looks on different resolutions at ViewLike.us,Just enter the URL and choose a resolution of your choice and you can see how your webpage looks on higher resolution monitors.It supports the following resolutions

iPhone
Wii Browser
800 x 600
1024 x 768
1152 x 864
1280 x 800
1400 x 900
1600 x 1200
1290 x 1200

Some webpages automatically increase or decrease width based on the resolution of the monitor, and some dont’t.It looks good if the page stretches so that we can make use of the full screen and display more content to the users rather than white space surrounding the content.

Check your webpages at ViewLike.us

How To Clean Your Wordpress Installation Of Old Unused Entries

Avinash — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:02:55 +0000

CCleaner is one of the most popular junk removal tool for windows that lets you removed temporary and orphaned,unused entries in your Windows Registry, Similarly Clean Options is a Wordpress plugin that lets you find orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table.

Clean Options finds orphaned options in the wp_options table but are not referenced by “get_option” or “get_settings” by any of the PHP files located within your blog directory. If you have deactivated plugins and/or non-used themes in your directory, the associated options will not be considered orphaned until the files are removed.

How to Clean Wordpress :

Download and Install Clean Options plugin, After Activating the plugin, you would find the plugin under Tools, then click Find Orphaned Options.
From the list of possibly orphaned options, select all and then click “View Selected Options Information”.
Then see the list of options and its values and then select either YES | NO and click “Submit” to delete the options.

NOTE : It is strongly suggested that you BACKUP your database before removing any options.

Clean Options WP Plugin works with PHP >= 4.2.0 and PHP 5 and is compatible upto WP 2.8

Download Clean Options Worpdress Plugin.

How To Show The Number of Visitors From Twitter To Your Post

Avinash — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:24:19 +0000

I’ve recently read an article at DBT, about how tweetmeme can help increase the number of tweets, of your post and thought of implementing tweetmeme, but tweetmeme show only the number of times your post has been retweetd.

Some blogs like showing the number of time a post has been read to show how popular a post is,but the number of visitors coming from twitter can also be a good indicator of traffic coming from the popular micro blogging site.You can now show the it using a simple script developed using the Bit.ly JavaScript API by John Resig which also doubles up as a retweet button.

The script has 2 variations in its display, horizontal and vertical.

Customize the script.

Download the .js Script File

Open and Edit the values in the JSfile

RetweetJS.link_text (Default: “Retweet”) - Change this to another value and change the text in the Button.
RetweetJS.count_text (Default: “clicks”) - Right now only “clicks” are supported but if you specify “none” it will show no count.
RetweetJS.prefix (Default: “”) - Setting to “RT @” will add it to the front of the tweets.
RetweetJS.styling (Default: The full CSS used for styling the retweet button.)

Integrate the script into Wordpress

Include the path to retweet.js file in the of your web site.For Example :
Add a class of ‘retweet’ in the anchor tag in the single.php file.For Ex.

” class=”retweet” rel= “nofollow”>

Features :

Completely Unobtrusive You can place the script in the of your document instead of inline which many other such scripts do.
Speed Retweet.js works completely asynchronously, loading data and updating the rendering as it comes in.
Pure HTML/CSS The result is just pure HTML styled with CSS - you can customize it however you wish, no images are required.
Number of clicks, not retweets - The number of clicks coming in is shown instead of the number of tweets your post got.
You control the data All tracking works directly through Bit.ly and all the clicks and traffic can be stored straight in your bit.ly account.

The script has been tested in Internet Explorer 6-8, Opera 9-10, Safari 3.2-4, Chrome 2, and Firefox 3-3.5.

Source: WebResourcesDepot

Create Desktop Post It Notes Using PNotes

Avinash — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:19:09 +0000

Create sticky post it notes on the desktop using PNotes, which creates virtual transparent desktop sticky notes on your as a replacement to your paper sticky notes, which are very easily editable and are always on the desktop and remind you of your tasks.

PNotes is highly customizable, you can customize the skins, fonts, colors, alarms, transparency level of the notes.You can also create your own skin for your PNotes using PNSkinCreator.You can also schedule each note to remind you about significant events.You can create Groups Sticky Notes by join notes into groups by your choice.

Features :

Always on Top,
transparent desktop post it notes
Text toolbar for editing texts on PNotes
Dock notes on any part of the desktop
Group similar notes together
Add reminders for notes
Skinnable and customizable skins using PNSkinCreator

Create notes on your desktop easily by right clicking on the PNotes icon tray icon and select “New Note”, you can also auto save PNotes and it is easy to type and edit notes, with the PNotes text tool bar available at the bottom of PNotes while typing the notes.You can dock notes to either Top, Right, Bottom or Left of the screen and they are always on top of all applications.

The best part is that this tool is available as no install (or) portable software so you can carry your notes along with you where ever you go on your USB pen Drive.

Download PNotes.

Change NIC MAC Address Using MAC Address Changer

Avinash — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:31:13 +0000

Media Access Control Address (MAC) is an unique unique identifier assigned to most network adapters or network interface cards (NICs) by the manufacturer for identification,On Networks like Ethernet, the MAC address uniquely identifies each node and allows frames to be marked for specific hosts. – Source Wikipedia

But changing MAC address can be difficult without some technical knowledge, but a simple tool called the Technitium MAC Address Changer with its simple user interface makes it easy to change the MAC Address of your Network Interface Card (NIC) bypassing the original hard coded MAC address and supports all Windows OS including Windows 7.The software does this by making registry entry.

You can also restore back to your original MAC Address easily from the application with a click of a button.

How to change MAC Address :

Starting MAC address changer will list all available network adapters.
Select the adapter you want to change the MAC address. You will get the details of your selection below.
Click Change MAC button, enter new MAC address and click Change Now button and confirm changes
To restore the original MAC address of the network adapter, select the adapter, click Change MAC button and then click Original MAC button and confirm changes you made when prompted.

Features :

Support all Windows OS including Windows 7 RC
Allows you to remove all registry entries corresponding to Network Adapter that is no longer physically installed on the system
Changes MAC address of Network Interface Card (NIC) including Wireless LAN Cards.
Select random MAC address from the list of manufacturers
Create Configuration Presets, which saves all your NIC settings and to switch between many settings easily.
Displays all information you would ever need to know about your NIC in one view like Device Name, Configuration ID, Hardware ID, Connection Status, Link Speed, DHCP details, TCP/IP details etc.
Allows you to configure IP Address, Gateway and DNS Server for your NIC
Allows you to enable/disable DHCP instantaneously.
Allows you to Release/Renew DHCP IP address

Download MAC Address Changer.

Note : “This software must not be used for any illegal or unethical purposes as defined by law in the country its used or in the country its used against.”

Download Norton Internet Security Suite 2010 Beta

Avinash — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:25:31 +0000

Norton Internet Security, one among the leading internet security solutions,has made available Norton Internet Security NIS 2010 Beta, and is also compatible with Windows 7.NIS 2010 is faster and more effective and offers comprehensive protection against all types of online threats. This release offers superior performance, improved protection, and features to help preserve the performance of your PC.

NIS 2010 Features :

Norton Safe Web, an extraordinarily effective new antispam engine
SONAR 2 technology to stop new and unknown threats
Norton Performance System to protect your PC’s performance
Identity Safe has been made portable to help you manage your identity

Images Source

System Requirements :

Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 or later Home/Professional/Media Center

300 MHz or faster processor
256 MB of RAM (512 MB RAM required for the Recovery Tool)
300 MB of available hard disk space

Microsoft Windows Vista® Home Basic/Home Premium/Business/Ultimate

Supports 32-bit and 64-bit platforms
Must meet the minimum Windows Vista operating system requirements

Microsoft Windows 7® Starter/Basic/Premium/Professional/Ultimate

Supports 32-bit and 64-bit platforms
Must meet the minimum Windows 7 operating system requirements

Support for AntiSpam:

Microsoft Outlook® XP or later
Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0 or later
Windows Mail (spam filtering only)

Browser support for Vulnerability Protection and Phishing Protection:

Microsoft Internet Explorer® 6.0 (32-bit only) and later
Mozilla Firefox® 3.0 and later

Download Norton Internet Security 2010 Beta

SignUp for Free Pingdom Account

Avinash — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:09:13 +0000

I’ve earlier shared 6 online services to check for your Site’s Uptime, But Pingdom didn’t offer a free account.Now pingdom is offering a offering free accounts.

Don’t know what Pingdom is ? Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring company that tracks and checks if your website/blog is online (uptime) or offline (downtime).Incase of a downtime you’ll be notified immediately about the same either by email or by SMS (or both).So that you can fix the problem at the earliest without loosing traffic to your site.

If you have an iPhone you can also monitor your website using Pingdom’s free iPhone App.

Download Pingdom iPhone App

With the free account you monitor one website or server and receive 20 SMS alerts and email alerts aswell.

To signup for a free account Visit Pingdom and click “Free SignUp”.

Note : You need to log in once every 90 days to keep your account alive.

2 SEO Wordpress Plugins For Better Internal Links and Post URL’s

Avinash — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:35:41 +0000

SEO Smart Links – Internal links ie., links to posts or keywords with your own blog can be good for SEO, this plugin automates this process by creating internal links from keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog, thereby increasing the number of internal links within your blog.
You can also set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs and also set nofollow attribute and open links in new window right from the plugins options page.

Make sure you have enabled WordPress cache by adding this line to your wp-config.php

define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

How to Install Wordpress plugin
- Download and Upload the plugin to the “plugins” folder
- Activate the plugin from the plugins page
- Change your options from the plugins options page.
- Download SEO Smart Links
SEO Post Links – Post slug ie, the words in the url, which play a vital role in SEO, and you don’t want to waste this space with common English words but with your keywords that you want to target.SEO Post Link is a wordpress plugin that gives you control on how the URL looks.
You can also edit post slug very easily from the permalink below the Post Title.

Features :
- Control how long you want your URL to be without comprising with the post title.
- Forcefully remove words from a URL that are shorter than the length specified by you in the plugin options.
- Automatically filter out unnecessary words, ( Words can be added or removed from the list anytime ).
- Automatically remove words that are shorter than say 4 or 5 characters.
Download SEO Post Links

This plugin will require one time free registration

Note : This plugin makes is even easier for beginners.

Make Your Blog/Website Print Friendly

Avinash — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:39:41 +0000

Take printer friendly prints by customizing your printout ie., you can choose/customize what you print without printing the whole page with unnecessary stuff on the print out like ads, image ( if you want only a text print ).

PrintFriendly is free web service that lets you save the page as PDF or Print only what you want from the webpage allowing you to manually choose what you want to remove from the webpage like text,images etc by removing unnecessary CSS and .

PrintFriendly supports all major blogging platforms and you can also take a printout/ save as PDF any webpage by visiting their website and entering the URL of which you want to take a printout of.You can also remove unwanted parts of the webpage by hovering over the unwanted object/paragraph of text in the page and selecting “click to delete”, which will be removed from the print.

There are different versions available of PrintFriendly

Common JS Code that can be placed on any site/blog ( in the template code ).Get the code from here(Select Website).
If you have a self hosted wordpress blog, you can make use of the PrintFriendly Wordpress Plugin.Activate and select your button style from the Plugin Settings Page.
If you are on Blogger, you can get the code from here(Select Blogger), and place it right after the
in your template (Note : Expand Widget Templates under Layout->Edit ).
There’s also a bookmarklet in case you print webpages frequently,that can be found here.

The idea behind PrintFriendly is to save money wasted on printing unnecessary data and also save the environment and helping take eco friendly prints.

Source : LifeRocks

How To Create Shortcuts Automatically On Desktop On Inserting Removable Media

Avinash — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:30:26 +0000

Similar to DeskDrive but with a smaller memory footprint and without the need of .Net Framwwork Desktop Media creates shortcuts automatically on desktop on inserting removable media in your system.The shortcut on the desktop is also automatically removed on removing the media, making it easy to access the removable media while its plugged in from the desktop.This is available in Linux by default, now you can have the same in Windows using Desktop Media.

Desktop Media is a tiny application for Windows OS that automatically adds drive icons to your desktop. It will detect USB drives, fixed drives (ie. your hard drives), CD/DVD drives, network drives, and even RAM disk drives.If you have a CD/DVD,USB drive plugged in you’ll see the shortcut on the desktop, but if no disc is present, you won’t see the icon on your desktop.

Features :

Automatically detects new (or existing) media and adds the icons to your desktop.
Has the ability to create soft links (shortcuts) or hard links (symbolic links).
Supports removable, fixed, network, CD/DVD, and RAM disk drives.
Ability to ignore user-specified drive letters.
Has the option to save the positions of the icons

Download Desktop Media

Create and Download Free Themes For Nokia Mobiles

Avinash — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:10:44 +0000

Mobile phones these days have become very customizable in terms of their user interfaces for example similar to PC’s we can also change the wallpapers and screensavers on mobile phones easily, but changing/creating a complete new theme for your mobile phone can be a difficult process in terms of designing images that are exact in scale with your mobile phone.

You can now create your own themes for your Nokia Mobile Phones easily online at TheUnlocker which completely eliminates the need to design wallpapers for your mobile phones, you can create themes using your imagination and using a web browser with flash player installed.
You can customize your themes with

Images – Main and Idle Background Images
Icons,
Text Colors for Softkeys, Calendar Events, Icon Text, etc.
Popup Message colors
Statusbar Options
Analog clock
Signal and Battery Indicators

Note : Images can be selected from the images available in different categories or uploaded from your PC.

Supported Nokia Models.

Nokia Series 60 (3 generation) - E50, E51, E60, E61, E61i, E65, E70, E90, N71, N73, N76, N77, N80, N81, N81 8GB, N82, N91, N92, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8Gb, 3250, 5500 Sport, 5700, 6110 Navigator, 6120, 6121, 6210 Navigator, 6220, 6290 and some other Nokia Series 60 3 generation.
Nokia Series 40 (3 generation) - 5300, 6126, 6131, 6131 NFC, 6133, 6233, 6234, 6265, 6265i, 6270, 6275, 6275i, 6280, 6282, 6288, 6300, 7370, 7373, 7390, 8600 Luna and some other Nokia Series 40 3 edition.

You can customize all the features of the Series 40 and Symbian 60, once the file is generated download it to your PC and upload it to mobile phone.

To create and download your free nokia theme online visit TheUnlocker and select the theme creator based on your Mobile Model.

How to Show First Image In Post as Thumbnail In Wordpress Blog

Avinash — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:51:35 +0000

I’ve shared a plugin called Thumbnail For Excerps that let you show thumbnails in your blog’s homepage using wordpress blogging platform.Here’s Attached Image WP plugin that will automatically show the first image in your post as a thumbnail image in your blogs homepage with more control on how the images look and easier to manage.

It can show the full, medium or thumbnail sized image attached to the current post.
It can make a hyperlink around the image that points to the post the image is attached to, the full image, the attachment page or a custom URL using custom fields on a post by post basis.
If more than one image is attached to a post then the image to be shown can be changed using the WordPress gallery page. Just pull the image you wish to show right to the top of the list and press save.

The plugins options page makes it easy to customize how the plugin works.Just call the plugin function within the loop.

      	